Comments on: Civil Service jobs, your way

By: Bookmarks for March 15th through March 22nd | DavePress

Bookmarks for March 15th through March 22nd | DavePress — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 13:01:27 +0000

[...] Civil Service jobs, your way – Steph on the new Civil Service jobs dataset. Interesting stuff. [...]

By: Nick Halliday

Nick Halliday — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 13:49:47 +0000

Steph great post – just came across your blog via Information World Review article by Tony Hirst well he did say your blog is ‘inspriational’ which for someone in government must be somewhat unique.

Just posted a link to my Facebook account for what its worth.

Congrats.
Nick

By: corky

corky — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:50:09 +0000

Sweet-ass api, i’ll have to have a play.

By: Steph

Steph — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:07:49 +0000

Absolutely Alex. For data to be opened up, you need a surprising amount of vision and courage behind the scenes from the data owners – and it’s great you were able to make that happen here.

The challenge is to broaden awareness and adoption of the great work David and his team have commissioned, so that jobbing web managers (excuse the pun) can easily work out what it means for them, their CMS, their templates. And there’s still a lot of work to be done with policy and comms teams to argue why open data is a good thing. Maybe there’s some case study material here both at a business and technical level?

By: alex butler

alex butler — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:46:27 +0000

thanks Steph…

lots of learning from this project. A year ago, I had to do some serious homework to be able to sell the RDFa and the API idea that David Pullinger and John Sheridan were espousing. I’m glad I did, but it was the legwork pursuading the HR types and the great direction from Esther and the Civil Serice recruitment team that swung this in the end. The lesson here is that the technical solution alone isn’t what makes the difference. It’s people bringing their various skills to bear – and the joy for me in this particular result is that.

By: Mizan Syed

Mizan Syed — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:46:41 +0000

Steph,

Just want to thank you for flagging this up and for the beta-testing you did for during the development, even at late nights.

Mizan

By: Steph

Steph — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:28:14 +0000

@simon: Who knows. The trouble is, so few people within government understand this or why you might want to do it (‘What? And lose all that traffic?’), that it never seems like a priority worth spending money on. In this example, a lot came down to a small number of people – well two or three Cabinet Office guys I can think of – with the skills and vision to make it happen. It’s hard to see how little APIs like this would be built and launched in most organisations with outsourced IT and web functions.

By: Simon Dickson

Simon Dickson — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:21:34 +0000

Five years ago – to the very day, would you believe! – I put a paper to the Cabinet Office asking them to provide an RSS interface into the Civil Service Recruitment Gateway database, and even offering to pay for it out of my own budget (I was still at ONS). It went nowhere. Or did it?